Who promised knowledge ye could not impart.”
But for all this, when in later life as a clergyman he used to prescribe for his poorer parishioners, he seems to have shown a power of diagnosis which made it evident that, though he failed as a surgeon apothecary, he might, had he had the requisite education, have succeeded as a consulting physician.[7]
Because he took Holy Orders and won his fame as a poet while a clergyman, Crabbe’s experiences, on which he founded his rhymed tales—for such his poems really are—are considered to have been mainly clerical. But, to understand him aright, we must remember that he was more or less engaged in the practice of medicine from the age of fourteen to that of twenty-five. It would be easy to quote many lines wherein the doctor and not the parson is revealed, and he never lost the professional dislike of quacks or contempt of valetudinarians.
Let us now consider how Crabbe’s experiences of Aldeburgh appear in his poems. I will take most of my extracts from his early poem, “The Village,” but a few will be from “The Borough,” which did not appear till more than twenty years later.
In “The Village” Crabbe boldly asks:
“From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray,
Where Virgil, not where Fancy, leads the way?”
and declines to follow the fashion of speaking of rural life as the height of felicity. He says:
“I grant indeed that fields and flocks have charms
For him that grazes or for him that farms;”